Angeles Donoso Macaya - Repensar A Memória Fotográfica

Ángeles Donoso Macaya 1
The Insubordination of Photography. Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship
Chapter One
Persistence of the Portrait
It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography.

In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones,
the cult value of the image finds its last refuge.
In the fleeting expression of a human face,
the aura beckons from the early photographs for the last time.
This is what gives them their melancholy and incomparable beauty.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
Not having a family photograph is tantamount to not being a part of humankind.

—Ana González González1
In the days that followed the civil-military coup, family photos and unassuming ID
photos acquired noteworthy political weight. This influence first materialized with an act of
protest as simple as it was significant: the practice of publicly displaying portraits or snapshots of
a detained loved one whose whereabouts are unknown. It would be impossible to determine the
precise moment this practice began, but this does not matter; in fact, the meaning of this
collective photographic practice resided not in its singularity or originality, but in its repetition
and persistence. We do know that this civil practice of photography began just a few days after
the coup, outside of the spaces temporarily repurposed by the military to detain and torture
Chilean citizens. One such space was the emblematic National Stadium, used as a concentration
camp from September 13 to November 9, 1973. Thousands of people were detained in this sports
arena-turned-imprisonment, torture, and execution camp.2 Outside of the National Stadium,
family members of the prisoners began to congregate hoping to receive news about their missing
loved ones. These family members, the majority of whom were mothers, wives, and sisters, did
not know for certain if their missing loved ones were being detained in the repurposed stadium.
It is not hard to imagine the scene: hundreds of anguished, scared people gathered along the
perimeter of the stadium, clutching photographs—photos torn from old albums, family portraits,
snapshots, copies of ID photos—and asking the few potentially sympathetic people who were
able to enter and leave the stadium (Red Cross representatives, a few journalists and
photographers, and a few recently released detainees), “Do you recognize this person?” or “Have
you seen this person inside?”3
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This spontaneous photographic practice is the point of departure for this chapter about the
composition and dissemination of the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared. My
exploration seeks to shed light on the paramount role the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of
Solidarity) played in the composition and dissemination of this archive and thus in the devising
and consolidation of the iconic representation of the victims of the crime of abduction. The
analysis I develop here underscores how the Vicaría and the relatives of the victims of the
military’s repressive campaign, through their work in the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos
Desaparecidos (AFDD) (Association of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared) gave the
crime of disappearances a visible form. The portraits of the disappeared were the main source for
this visual rendering. At the Vicaría offices, photographers Luis Navarro and Helen Hughes
devoted part of their time to making copies of the photographs submitted by family members
soliciting legal aid. They reproduced and enhanced hundreds of portraits.4 The new portraits
facilitated the detainees’ recognition and formed part of the legal records gathered by the Vicaría
in order to prepare appropriate legal actions. Visual artists Hernán Parada and Luz Donoso also
played important roles in the organization and reproduction of photographic portraits of the
detained-disappeared. These artists began to work with the Agrupación in 1974: they received
the few photographs obtained from relatives by the Agrupación, produced new camera shots and
finally developed the negatives and enlarged them at the Taller de Artes Visuales (TAV) (Visual
Arts Workshop).5 Donoso and Parada, working sometimes in collaboration with artists Elías
Adasme, Víctor Hugo Codocedo, and Patricia Saavedra, incorporated these re-photographed and
blown-up portraits into their practices, disseminating the photographic archive of the detained-
disappeared even further.
This chapter develops then two interconnected threads: one investigates the role the
Vicaría had in the composition and the dissemination of the portraits of the disappeared; the
other analyzes and considers the displacements and the various material transformations the
photographic portraits endured—displacements and transformations that were necessary to
continue denouncing and protesting the military repression. My analysis reveals that the history
of the composition of the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared was concomitant to
the dissemination and the transformation of the portraits that constituted this archive. As we shall
see, at the same time that the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared was taking form,
its objects—copies of ID photos, re-photographed photos, contact-sheets, photocopies, etc.—
were being altered, reproduced, displaced, and put into circulation through different media. The
public display of photographic portraits was critical in putting a face—that is a visual
representation—to the crime of forced disappearances.
The chapter first begins with a brief revision of Walter Benjamin’s and Allan Sekula’s
formulations regarding the technical transformations endured by the photographic portrait since
the late mid-nineteenth century. The photographic portraits of the detained-disappeared have
stirred important critical debates in the Southern Cone in the last few decades. My own reading
builds on and expands the existing scholarship about the uses of the portraits of the disappeared.
In the second part, I explore the debates that emerged in the early nineties (and continue to this
day) in the Southern Cone, regarding the display and uses of these portraits. I reconsider the
predominance that critical studies have given to the photographic trace in determining the
documentary value of the portraits, and I also interrogate the wariness with which these studies
consider or address the intrinsic iconicity of the portraits. Taking as a point of departure the
principle that the photographic portrait is a complex visual sign—simultaneously an index, icon,
and symbol—my claim is that the documentary weight of the portraits of the disappeared resides
as much in their iconic aspects as in the fact that they are luminous inscriptions (traces) of
disappeared persons. The re-photographed and photocopied portraits I study performed as
documents in the archive, in printed media (books and magazines), and in different public
interventions, acquiring further symbolic meanings through these public performances. The
different kinds of materiality and formal features the portraits had in these public performances
defy the common view of the photograph as mainly an index or a trace.
The third part of the chapter begins by contextualizing the vital documentary and
counter-archival work carried out by the Vicaría.6 In the second part of the chapter, I study some
of these forms. I propose the notion of the photo-copy rationale to consider how the visual
representation of the disappeared was composed and how the Vicaría’s photographic archive
took shape. I analyze three key publications produced by the Communications Unit of the
Vicaría: the magazines Solidaridad and Separata Solidaridad and ¿Dónde están? (Where Are
They?), a seven-volume book series published between late 1978 and 1979. The visual
representation of the crime of forced disappearances, which began to take shape in the practice of
publicly displaying portraits outside concentration camps, was further disseminated and
consolidated in these publications.
In the last part of the chapter, I analyze photographs of actions and interventions in which
portraits were displayed, used, and embodied. Many interventions and public demonstrations
were made, so to speak, for the camera. These public demonstrations did not last long—some
lasted a few seconds, others a few minutes; it depended on how long it took for the police to
arrive and dissolve the protest—so it was important to record them. The photographic and
audiovisual records of these demonstrations became key in further amplifying the protest,
through different media (for example, in articles or chronicles that reported on these
demonstrations). Visual artists resorted to this strategy, and so did the relatives of the victims of
the repression.7
In order to fully take stock of the composition and dissemination of this performative
photographic archive, we must follow its echoes across space and time. Spatially, these echoes
will take us from outside the National Stadium to the offices of the Vicaría, to the TAV, and
from there to the various emblematic public spaces in the city—the Supreme Court building, the
Veterinary School of the University of Chile, the Plaza de Armas, and the Estación Central,
among others. Chronologically, the disseminations of this archive will take us from the days
right after the coup to 1978, and from 1984 to 2015, the year I found a worn-out but meaningful
contact-sheet at the Vicaría’s photographic archive. I am getting ahead of myself…because
before encountering this contact sheet (a photographic source that was also, in and of itself, a
copy), I encountered and was deeply moved by a series of peculiar photographic portraits. In
these portraits, the photographed subject wears a mask (see fig 1.1). Also remarkable, the mask
the individual wears is clearly a photocopied portrait. The masked individual performs different
gestures in front of the camera, using his own hands: in one photograph he covers his eyes, in
another his mouth, and in a third, his ears. With these gestures, the masked man seeks to convey,
to tell me, his spectator, that he can’t see, he can’t speak, and he can’t hear. Why can’t he see,
speak, or hear? Who is the masked individual and to whom does the photocopied mask belong?
Figure 1.1. “Obrabierta A” (1974–present). Hernán Parada poses with Alejandro’s mask on; he
can’t speak. July 1985. Credit: Adriana Silva. Black and white. Hernán Parada’s personal
archive.
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I shall finish this introduction by stating that what motivates the following reflections is,
in many senses, evident. The portraits of the detained-disappeared seem so evident. So obvious
to the eye—and to the mind.8 Most of them are so simple: black-and-white, frontal shots cut over
the shoulders. In some iterations, these austere portraits, somber icons, are displayed
accompanied by the question ¿Dónde están? (Where are they?). Some are wary of their
iconicity: icons tend to be associated with pure images, with surfaces devoid of “depth.”9 There
are different variations of these formulations in critical discourses—I will come back to this
later. However, as some critics have also argued, reflecting on the evocative and mobilizing
force of the portraits and on the visual strategies that allowed for, amplified, and sustained their
persistent presence in the public sphere is imperative.10 These matters are not disconnected from
the question about the portraits’ emergence—which flourished collectively: it began as a
disseminated practice—the question about their consolidation, and the (not so) evident question
regarding the composition of the crime of disappearance both as a legal concept and as an image.
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<a> (De)Constructing the Photographic Portrait
Which representational mechanisms and instances of identification, commemoration,
control, and denunciation are at play in the photographic portrait? Which visual strategies,
technical qualities, and uses are enabled in/by these instances? How—in light of what notions or
ideas—does one address the reminiscent and haunting powers of a re-photographed and
photocopied portrait? To elucidate these questions about the processes that underlie the
composition of the portraits, it is worthwhile to begin evoking an idea formulated by Walter
Benjamin and reproduced as an epigraph: “In the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura
beckons from the early photographs for the last time.” Why early photographs? Benjamin feels a
strong proximity to these old portraits. The persons depicted in these pictures seem more genuine
and closer to him due to the natural lighting that surrounds them. In the ephemeral facial
expressions of those old portraits the aura takes last refuge, as he explains. The presence of the
aura in old portraits and its subsequent loss with the advent of studio portraiture, Benjamin
claims, has a technical explanation. The long exposure time required for the lens to capture as
much light as possible enabled, in the first decades of photography, the more “natural” apparition
of the subject portrayed. As Benjamin put it in his “Little History of Photography:” “The
procedure itself caused the subject to focus his life on the moment rather than hurrying on past it;
during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject (as it were) grew into the picture.”11
Benjamin, who writes his “Little History” from the perspective of a fascinated viewer of
photographs, talks at length about how these anonymous, distant faces, move him.12 This
dialectical tension between proximity and distance, which is commonly experienced when
looking at photographs, is core in the notion of the Benjaminian aura.13

According to Benjamin, both the decay of photography and the loss of its aura took place
toward the end of the nineteenth century, when “photographers made it their business to simulate
the aura which had been banished from the picture with the suppression of darkness through
faster lenses, exactly as it was being banished from reality by the deepening degeneration of the
imperialist bourgeoisie.”14 The creation of faster lenses allowed photographers to work inside
their studios, but the suppression of darkness and extreme sharpness of the new photographs
were such that photographers had to “simulate” the aura by means of various retouching
techniques:
These pictures were made in rooms where every client was confronted, in the
person of the photographer, with a technician of the latest school; whereas the
photographer was confronted, in the person of every client, with a member of a
rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s
frock coat or floppy cravat. For this aura was by no means the mere product of a
primitive camera. Rather, in this early period, subject and technique were as
exactly congruent as they become incongruent in the period of decline that
immediately followed.15
Benjamin establishes thus a significant affinity between industrialization processes, the
commercialization of photography—specifically of the studio portrait—and the contrived quality
of the photographic portrait.
In relation to the historical conditions that determined the emergence of the photographic
portrait, Allan Sekula’s genealogy is also illuminating. Since the mid-nineteenth century, and
particularly since the 1880s, photography functioned within a complex system of compilation,
cataloguing, and information analysis whose most important artifact, according to Sekula, was
not the camera but the filing cabinet. Still, Sekula suggests, “[This] archival promise was
frustrated […] both by the messy contingency of the photograph and by the sheer quantity of
images.”16 Countering the more monolithic tenets about nineteenth century photographic realism
and its mimetic ideology, Sekula nuances the role of photography in the creation of police
archives and denaturalizes certain fairly generalized ideas related to the photographic registers
created by the police—from which the ID photo derives. Alphonse Bertillon, a member of the
Paris police force at the end of the nineteenth century, attempted to organize the chaotic and
enormous photographic archive of the institution—comprising more than one hundred thousand
photographs by 1891—by creating the first effective system of criminal identification. In order to
prevent ambiguity in the photographs, Bertillon insisted on the importance of a standardized
focal distance, consistent, even use of light, and maintenance of a fixed distance between the
camera and the subject.17 These strategies were nevertheless insufficient for cataloguing subjects,
so Bertillon created a file in which he included, besides the photographic portrait, an
anthropometric description and a series of abbreviated and standardized notes.
We typically think of the ID photo as an almost exclusively denotative object, a sign of
the purest visual empiricism. Benjamin’s and Sekula’s accounts, however, shed light on the
socio-historical conditions which gave form to the standardization of the studio portrait and the
criminal mug shot; these accounts emphasize the mediated character of this photographic
representation. Sekula illustrates how during an era in which the mimetic ideology prevailed—
and consequently the notion that the photographic image was true because it was the exact
reproduction of its referent—criminal record photography depended on a whole system of
mediations. At the same time, it must be noted that Sekula’s influential study falls short in one
crucial matter. As Deborah Poole compellingly argues, “missing from Sekula’s account […] is
any mention of either colonialism and its racial ideology or the thousands of native and colonial
cartes de visite that joined—and indeed anticipated—criminal photography in delimiting what
Sekula aptly refers to as the ‘terrain of the other.’”18 Indeed, as Poole demonstrates, the colonial
visual archive participated “in specific ways in the consolidation, dissemination, and
popularization of [the] logic of comparability and equivalency.” This logic of comparability and
equivalency precedes the emergence of the archive and nurtures archival rationale.
Figure 1.2. Members of the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD) put
posters on walls. (January 1985). Credit: P.V. Black and white. Fundación de Documentación y
Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad.
<b> The Portraits of the Detained-Disappeared: Traces, Icons, and Symbols of the Repression
The display of family snapshots and ID photos became a widespread practice in the
public rallies, marches, vigils, and hunger strikes organized to protest the repressive apparatuses
of the dictatorship. Amid a context of complete silence—and denial—on the part of the militaries
regarding the whereabouts of hundreds of persons who had been illegally detained or abducted
(hence the use of the word desaparecidos by their relatives and by the organizations that
advocated for them), photographic portraits of the victims of the repression began to surface
everywhere. They appeared pinned to the clothes of the victims’ relatives; enlarged photocopies
of the portraits were made to be used as posters or banners in rallies and demonstrations (see fig.
1.2); ID photos and family portraits were disseminated in printed media; on occasions, group
photographs were cropped, altered, and even enhanced to single out or highlight the particular
features of the missing person. These diverse forms of photographic display accompanied by the
persistent enunciation of ¿Dónde están? (Where are they?), sought to render visible and
materialize in the public space what the regime was trying to hide, erase, and silence—the
existence of the detained-disappeared. Without disregarding the fact that the photographs
displayed referred to real people who were disappeared by state apparatuses, in what follows I
take up on the tension between the evidentiary value of these images and their iconic status. This
critical discussion will allow me to better elucidate in the following sections the technical and
formal strategies used to compose and disseminate the portraits of the disappeared—iconic
representations that continue being displayed to this day.
In La ciudad de los fotógrafos, member of the Agrupación Ana González tells that the
only family portrait she has with her husband and children, all of them detained-disappeared, was
taken by a street photographer who showed up at their house offering his services. Even though
they barely had money to eat, they decided to pose for him and pay him for the photograph. This
photograph would become a treasured memento for González. While it is true that some
photographs were taken in exceptional circumstances such as this, in most cases, and leaving
aside copied ID photos, the portraits and snapshots that were consigned in the photographic
archive of the detained-disappeared came from the private sphere and were produced in everyday
situations and family events (birthdays, family reunions, or the first day of school). The
quotidian and intimate contexts of production of these snapshots ask us to see the photos as
candid records, as if they were devoid of artifice or were not coded. Not only do these family
photos compel a gaze that is affiliative and “identificatory” and seem “instantly familiar,” as
Andrea Noble argues, but also their public display “in the context of human rights activism in
Argentina and indeed across a range of Latin American countries” has become familiar.19 This
apparent familiarity is connected to the iconicity of these portraits—an aspect that Noble also
considers in her study of the public display of portraits of the victims of the repression during the
Argentinean military dictatorship. Commenting on the media dissemination of portraits made for
or in front of the camera, Noble draws attention to “the ubiquity of photographic icons of forced
disappearances” and asserts, “as a mode of photographic performance and endlessly repeated
gesture staged precisely for the camera, such images have achieved iconic status.”20 Ludmila Da
Silva Catela, also studying the Argentinean case, further argues that the portraits of the
disappeared “not only succeeded in representing the disappearance, but also […] created a strong
iconic referent for denouncing [such disappearances] […] A black and white photo used in a
march, pinned to the body of a mother, hanging in a square, stamped on an Argentine flag, rarely
deserves the question, ‘Who are they? What does it mean?’”21
These assertions are indisputable, but they beg the question: how did this happen? How
did these portraits succeed in representing the disappearance, how did they become iconic
referents for denouncing the military’s repressive tactics? To answer these questions, we need to
move the camera a little to the west and also to readjust the focus. Why? Because we need to
take a closer look at the Chilean case, which has not received as much critical attention as the
Argentinean case has with regards to the portraits of the disappeared. The symbolisms the
portraits have acquired over time, their strong iconicity, and their persistent displacements, are
effect of these earlier efforts of reproduction, composition, and dissemination. In fact, one aspect
that tends to be disregarded in critical studies about visual representations of the disappeared is
that their photographic portraits were composed in different stages, that they were the result of
several processes of manipulation and reproduction (cropping, enhancement, etc.).
Several critics have commented on the complexities and the paradoxes that frustrate
critical consideration of the desaparecidos in the Southern Cone, particularly those that arise
regarding their textual and visual representations—including, of course, the photographic
portraits.22 As already stated, the repressive contexts amid which these portraits emerged can’t be
disregarded. Given these contexts, it seems difficult not to accept the portraits at face value—i.e.,
as they are presented to us, as the most direct and immediate sign of the person they represent.
At the same time, as Diana Taylor reminds us in her influential Disappearing Acts:
the desaparecidos (the disappeared), are, by definition, always already the object
of representation. The flesh-and-blood victims, forcefully absented from the
sociopolitical crisis that created them, left no bodies. Those disappeared. The
victim reemerged as icons, either as “subversives” (for the military government)
or as the “disappeared” (for the Madres and other human rights activists)—
powerful, conflicting images that reintroduced the missing into the public sphere
as pure representation.23
Undeniable as this assertion is, it does not resolve the complexity that arises in the attempt to
critically consider the portraits—and Taylor does not fail to acknowledge this. About the
photographic portraits displayed by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, she reasons:
These photos, like magic fetishes, keep the dead and brutalized bodies forever
“alive.” They tempt us to see them as “natural” and transparent manifestations of

the “real.” Thus it seems treasonous to resist that view by insisting on the iconic
quality of these photographs […] The political exigencies seem to beg for the
uncritical acceptance of the object as the thing itself.24
The uses the relatives gave to the portraits of their disappeared loved ones incited art
critics and theorists in Chile to reflect on the documentary qualities of the photograph, to ponder
about what specific traits made of photographs incontestable proof of those lives that were
forcefully erased. In several writings, the photographic trace appears as the determining
evidentiary attribute of the photograph. This is apparent in Jean-Louis Déotte’s study about the
“art in the epoch of disappearance,” formulation that builds on and expands art critic Nelly
Richard’s ideas concerning the Chilean artistic practices’ turn towards the medium of
photography in the late seventies.25 The sororal community formed around the relatives who
looked for their disappeared loved ones, argues Déotte, needs to understand that the bodies have
been “really swallowed, subtracted. This knowledge requires—but the paradox is only
apparent—a return to the certainty that they really existed. Thus, the extreme importance of the
photograph: minimum proof of existence against an uncertainty that increases.”26 According to
Déotte, the artistic practices that resisted the military repression, just like the sororal community
formed around the relatives, could not be disentangled from “a cognitive element, empiric even,
that has to give the assurance that an existence had in fact, taken place. This element becomes
the core idea of the work […] The art in the age of disappearance requires the photograph and,
more generally, the traces of an impression.”27
Roland Barthes’s formulation of the photograph as a physical “emanation of the referent”
in his Camera Lucida, greatly influenced the critical debates that emerged in Chile in the late
seventies;28 so did Susan Sontag’s definition of the photograph as a memento mori in her On
Photography.29 A passage from an often-cited essay by Nelly Richard illustrates these critical
orientations:
If the device of the photograph contains in itself the temporal ambiguity of that
which still is and of that which no longer is (of that which remains suspended
between life and death, between appearing and disappearing), such ambiguity is
over-dramatized in the case of the photographic portraits of disappeared people.
This is why the portraits that the detainees’ relatives carry pinned to their breasts
have become the densest symbol in the crusade of memory conducted by the
victims to remember and make us remember the past.30
Richard’s argument brings attention to a separate issue that complicates even further the critical
consideration of these photographs: strictly speaking, these are not portraits of disappeared
people. The photos, obviously, were taken before the subjects portrayed in them became
disappeared.31 Richard connects eloquently the ambiguity that characterizes the photograph in
general to the suspended temporality that frames the photographed subjects, neither alive nor
dead, but disappeared. Richard’s passage also allows us to appreciate the extent to which the
portraits of the disappeared functioned as emblems or symbols as much as they did as certificates
or traces. In suggesting that the portraits have become the densest symbol in the crusade of
memory, Richard gives account of the photographic portrait as complex visual object: here is an
iconic representation of an individual (just like a painted portrait can be an iconic
representation), which carries also the individual’s luminous trace (and in this respect it differs
from the painted portrait), and which because of specific circumstances, can become a symbol—
or many symbols. Indeed, the portraits are tokens of the repression and symbols of the resistance
to the repression, to the crime of abduction; moreover, these symbols mourn loss and death and
envisage love and the work of memory, etc.
The central idea advanced by different critical approaches is that in photography’s civil
political space (I evoke here Ariella Azoulay’s formulation of a civil political space imagined
day after day by people who use photography), the portraits of the disappeared were (and
continue to be) displayed and used as visual proofs to attest to the existence of particular
individuals, to claim (irreparable) damages, to demand justice, and to keep the memory of the
victims of the repression alive. The incorporation of these portraits into artistic practices, besides
connoting the ideas just stated, also conveyed the idea of disappearance as the sign of an epoch.
Thus, the small, worn-out photographic portraits that began to emerge in the streets to denounce
forced disappearances, soon began to be supplemented with other meanings and functions:
opposing the military regime, activating the work of memory, and resisting forgetfulness.
However, that which twenty years ago was considered in terms of eloquence and
performativity—the undeniable iconic and symbolic force of the portraits of the desaparecidos,
their persistent presence in public spaces, and their eventual incorporation into artistic
practices—is rendered in recent critical approaches an aspect that might not only objectify the
portraits, but also stagnate the work of memory. Implicit in these claims is the idea that the very
iconicity and reproducibility of the portraits ultimately fossilizes them. One critic, for instance,
talks about the “pre-packaged” political meaning of the portraits of the disappeared and wonders
whether “alternative or supplementary depictions of disappearance” can emerge.32 The problem
with this line of argumentation is that it considers only the incorporation of portraits of the
disappeared in specific artistic practices, but fails to consider photography as a civil practice and
thus disregards the political space opened-up by these portraits in the public arena. I cannot help
but wonder how the relatives of the desaparecidos would feel if they were told the portraits they
display are fetishized fossils, objects with “pre-packaged” political meaning. Furthermore, if as
Taylor justly reminds us, the desaparecidos are always already the objects of representation,
what can their portraits be if not iconic supplementary representations? Can the re-photographed
and photocopied portraits be considered something other than iconic supplements? I believe they
cannot, but I don’t see this as a limitation. Quite the contrary, I believe that it is precisely in their
overwhelming iconicity that their evocative force resides.
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<c> The Vicaría and the Composition of the Photographic Corpus of the Desaparecidos
The Vicaría, which began to function on January 1, 1976, continued and expanded the
work that the Comité Pro Paz had initiated in October 1973.33 The creation of this organization
within the Catholic Church was noteworthy: as Vicaría’s Executive Secretary Javier Luis Egaña
Barahona suggests, “the only way to confront the military dictatorship was with a powerful
institution, and it was very symbolic that the organization that defended human rights was
located in the Archbishop’s Palace, in the heart of the city.”34 The organization strived to
disseminate the message about the importance of respecting and defending the rights of all
human beings and about loving and caring for the poor, and Vicaría’s biweekly Solidaridad was
an important medium to achieve this endeavor.35 Since a good portion of its readership was only
semi-literate, having an effective iconic language was key and a Communications Unit was
promptly established. This Unit grew rapidly and attracted a number of professional journalists
and photographers. The prevalence of the visual component is apparent in the spectacular design
of the magazine (see fig. 1.3).36 Thorough attention was paid to the way information was
presented and conveyed, both in the covers and in the interior pages of the magazine.37 So much
so, that Helen Hughes recalls that when she applied for the second photographer position
(Vicaría’s first photographer was Luis Navarro), she was asked to submit a portfolio and also to
complete different specific assignments—as if she were in a competition.38 Navarro and Hughes
did numerous photographic reportages for the magazine, and went on assignment to different
parts of the city—and the country. Stunning collages were composed using their photographs. In
many ways, the Vicaría also played a role in the promotion of visual literacy as well as in the
development and dissemination of documentary photography.
Figure 1.3. “Libertad de expresión.” Interior page of Solidaridad 73 (1979). Black and white.
Fundación de Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad.
One of the Vicaría’s most important endeavors was fighting to establish the truth about
the whereabouts of the disappeared. As some readers of this book may know and as the Report of
the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation documents, during the first
months following the military coup, thousands of people were detained. In most occasions, these
detentions were not acknowledged; victims “were kept in clandestine detention, subjected to
torture, and eventually summarily executed. Their bodies were disposed of in secret.”39
Disappearances were systematically applied during the first four years of military rule, but the
Report notes that they were “not centrally coordinated” at the very beginning.40 This changed in
November 1973, when Augusto Pinochet established the DINA (National Intelligence
Directorate), the infamous secret police headed by the merciless criminal Colonel Manuel
Contreras. After the creation of this intelligence unit, “‘disappearances’ became a carefully
organized method designed to exterminate opponents considered dangerous and to avoid
accountability for such crimes.”41 After the military decided to close the last concentration camp
that remained open in November 1977 (Tres Álamos) it became apparent to Vicaría workers that
“there were many people for whom habeas corpus had achieved nothing. They had not returned
home, they had not been released, or reported as expelled from the country, or taken to court. So,
then we said: we had to find a name for this situation. That’s how the Detained-Disappeared Unit
was created.”42 As Vicaría lawyer Hector Contreras suggests, to be able to denounce and
investigate the crime of disappearances, it was necessary to give it a name first—until that
moment, the concept of detained-disappeared did not exist as such.
Vicaría staff devised a very efficient data-keeping-and-analyzing system that listed
biometrical and biographical personal information, including political affiliation, union
involvement, etc., as well as details and facts regarding the time of the person’s disappearance,
particular physical traits and relevant medical records (scars, teeth removals, etc.). This
exceptional record-keeping system, which Vicaría staff called la sábana (the sheet) because of
its large dimensions, permitted them to gather different kinds of information and present it in a
way that facilitated its visualization.43 La sábana allowed the Vicaría’s lawyers, legal aids, and
social workers to crosscheck data, compare records, and analyze information more effectively.
This, in turn, allowed Vicaría lawyers to prepare more compelling legal claims and thus bring to
justice hundreds of habeas corpus cases. The information compiled in this system became
extremely very relevant after a clandestine grave was discovered in the town of Lonquén (a
documentary matter I study in the next chapter). As we shall see, the Vicaría devised very clever
strategies to corroborate, secure, and make public physical and visual evidence that contested, for
the very first time, the versions offered by the military regime and by the official media with
regards to the detained-disappeared.
La sábana was a sophisticated and multilayered document, which was part of a much
bigger archive, a counter-archive that was assembled, however precariously, on the run, its
structure and internal logic evolving and changing according to the needs.44 The main objective
of this critical counter-archive was to keep track, compile, organize, and analyze the
dictatorship’s distinct repressive methods. Remarkably, this counter-archive not only was
contemporaneous to the repressive regime it resisted—the civic-military dictatorship—but also it
was built right in front of the repressers’ eyes. This counter-archive encompassed different kinds
of publications—bulletins and internal reports prepared by the Church—and record-keeping
systems—including the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared.
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As González’s story about her only family photograph suggests, the relatives of the
disappeared possessed few photographs and, in many cases, those in their possession were in
such poor condition that it was necessary to mend, reproduce, and organize them. Navarro recalls
that the number and condition of the photos brought by the relatives to the offices of the Vicaría
made apparent the families’ socioeconomic status. The poorest families owned only very few
photos, and those they owned were discolored and wrinkled. To obtain better quality
photographs of the already existing photos, a lens capable of focusing at a very close distance
was needed. Since the lenses the photographers had in their possession lacked close focus
capabilities, it occurred to Navarro that turning the camera lens upside down and fastening it to
the body of the camera with a tape would allow the photographer to produce better quality and
sharper images of the old prints brought by the relatives. After making a satisfactory copy of the
source photograph, Navarro printed it on matte paper and retouched it with a graphite pencil (as
he saw fit). He then proceeded to re-photograph the improved portrait. In Navarro’s own words,
“we did not have the means, and these were things that were produced out of necessity.”45 After
being cropped, mended, and re-photographed (and at times photocopied), the portraits were
catalogued in the photographic archive and disseminated in printed media. This process,
expectedly, produced a sort of standardization. The portraits, one next to the other, look very
similar. The resemblance is emphasized in the portraits’ visual arrangement—the way they are
displayed in the media, above all on the covers of the ¿Dónde están? book series. These iconic
covers suggest that the Vicaría not only composed the photographic archive, but also played a
key role in the composition of the visual representation of the detained-disappeared.
The retouched and re-photographed portraits consigned in the photographic archive also
appeared periodically in Solidaridad. Several portraits were disseminated in the sections
detailing the habeas corpus presented by the Vicaría on behalf of the detainees (see fig 1.4). Such
is the case of Luis Mardones, Osvaldo Figueroa, William Zulueta, and Humberto Drouilas,
whose portraits were reproduced in the section titled “Noticias Judiciales de la semana” (Legal
News of the Week). Mardones, Figueroa, Zulueta, and Drouilas were abducted by DINA agents
in May 1977. These four men, along with Eduardo de la Fuente and Jorge Troncoso, were
charged, by means of forced confession under torture, with the kidnapping of minor Carlos
Veloso. At the moment of the publication of number 19 of Solidaridad, it was known that they
were detained at Cuatro Alamos, one of the clandestine torture centers set up by the DINA.46
Figure 1.4. Solidaridad 19. Photographic Portraits of four men detained, Luis Mardones,
Osvaldo Figueroa, William Zulueta, and Humberto Drouilas. Black and white. Fundación de
Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad.
The enlarged photographs reproduced in the pages of the magazine had, primarily, an
illustrative function—by looking at the photographs, readers could identify the men. Their
photographs were presented to complement the text that provided relevant information about the
abductions: the moment at which each abduction took place (date, time, and place) and
information about the habeas corpus as well as other relevant facts (testimonies of witnesses and
information pointing to evidence of the detainees’ innocence). Despite their illustrative function,
the visual information offered by the images is limited; readers learned nothing about the height,
body build or other physical traits of the detainees. The portraits showed only their faces in black
and white. Furthermore, readers could not know for certain whether or not these were recent
images. Yet, despite scarce and contingent visual information, these portraits were (and are)
effective: the recognition and identification gesture is seemingly automatic. We cannot but stare
at Drouillas’ hopeful gaze, at Mardones’ serious expression, or at the sadness projected by
Zuleta’s and Figueroa’s gaze. The readers who saw these images in Solidaridad during that
month of May knew that these men had been abducted and that, at the moment of the publication
of the newsletter, they were detained in a concentration camp. Even today it is impossible to
ignore this information while looking at these worn-out portraits.
What do these portraits show us? Mustaches, moles, wide eyebrows, and a full head of
hair or baldness. More than an informative function, the portraits featured in these news sections
have perhaps an affective role. The invocative power of these images lies in the countenance’s
emblematic authority. These gazes reclaim the viewer’s attention; they interpellate us. If the
Vicaría gave a name to the detained-disappeared, the portraits “put faces” to the name,
augmenting the realness of these cases. In these portraits, the Barthesian division between
studium and punctum becomes indistinct. Or, to put it a bit differently, these portraits illustrate
that the distinction between these notions is always relative. Even though the photographic
punctum is commonly described in terms of contiguity, uniqueness, and immediacy, Barthes
himself suggests in Camera Lucida that the punctum carries within it a transformative force, that
the punctum has a metonymic and expansive potential which allows for a certain latency.47 This
means not only that the single memory of an image can activate the punctum, but also that the
photographic subject herself can multiply and differ. As Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-
Rocca explain in their reading of this essay: “What Barthes engages […] is nothing less than
what produces the difficulty of all contemporary reflections on photography: the absence of the
subject. But, as he suggests—and here lies his strength and courage—this absence does not result
from disappearance or effacement, but, on the contrary, from multiplication and proliferation.”48
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I think of this dialectical relationship between absence and proliferation as I watch a set
of photographs published in Separata Solidaridad in November 1978. Photographic portraits not
only appeared along texts in the informative sections, they also became photographic subjects,
protagonists of other photographs disseminated in the Vicaría publications. In this issue of
Separata Solidaridad, for instance, the portraits of the detainees coexist inside the photographs
with other elements (the chains) and other subjects (the women who display the portraits pinned
to their garments). Solidaridad readers did not need to read the text to know that the women had
chained themselves as a form of protest and that the worn-out photographs they carried pinned to
their clothes were of their disappeared relatives. They did not need to read this, because women
from the Agrupación persistently circulated in public with these portraits pinned to their
clothes—portraits that, until then, had not left the private space. To this first instance of
displacement and dissemination—the portrait leaves the album, the frame—a second instance of
displacement is added in the re-photographing of the portrait, and further in the dissemination of
the photo in the magazine. Navarro took these photographs at a public demonstration organized
by the Agrupación. The women chained themselves to the main gates of the CEPAL building
(the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), carrying
photographic portraits pinned to their clothes. The demonstration was to protest the regime’s
explanation regarding the figure of the “muerte presunta” (presumed death). Agrupación women
rightfully refused to accept this legal figure, which allowed the military (by placing pressure on
the justice system) to dismiss habeas corpus claims—a person declared “presumably dead” was
not detained-disappeared, and thus the habeas corpus claim could be overruled.49
Figure 1.5. Detail of Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared member and protestor
Lucía Cantero, showing with portraits of her sister and uncle pinned to her chest. (November
1978). Credit: Luis Navarro. Black and white. Luis Navarro’s personal archive.
In the photograph reproduced in the upper left, two portraits are re-photographed by
Navarro (see fig. 1.5). The portraits are of protestor Lucía Cantero’s sister and uncle, both
disappeared in 1976.50 By cropping Cantero’s face from the frame, the photographer prevents her
from becoming the center of the picture. Instead, he places the small portraits at the center. With
this gesture, the photographic representation points to the coincidence between the political
gesture and the affective gesture. That the portraits may be in bad shape, or that they may be
photocopies is irrelevant; a woman, a protestor, carries these portraits pinned to her chest, and
with this act she gives flesh to the expression “te llevo en el corazón” (I keep/carry you in my
heart). The photograph placed below portrays a collective of eleven women of different ages (see
fig 1.6). Because the framing cuts off the last woman in the row, it suggests that the row
continues. The attitudes and poses of the women vary. The woman on the left appears tired, with
a blank stare, as she leans against the fence. Some women look directly into the camera while
others look off to the side; at least two seem to be smiling.

Figure 1.6. Separata Solidaridad 23. “The force of life will break the chains.” Frontal shot of
Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared members (all women) chained to the
CEPAL November 1978. Credit: Luis Navarro. Black and white. Fundación de Documentación y
Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad.
The structure, bounds, and contents of the Vicaría’s counter-archive were continuously
being transformed and expanded; these contents were also displaced and disseminated in the
book series titled ¿Dónde están? whose seven volumes were published between November 1978
and May 1979. The series presented a compilation of all the documents gathered by the
organization pertaining to the cases brought to the courts on behalf of 478 desaparecidos, all of
them detained in different circumstances between 1973 and 1976. In the Introduction to the first
volume, Episcopal Vicar Reverend Cristián Precht states:
In the pages that follow, the reader will find the exact reproduction of the
personal records delivered to the Ministry of the Interior, and which constitute a
summary of the compiled documentation and evidence each family also possesses
[…] The antecedents given are not new for either the Courts of Justice or the
government: nor are they completely unknown to the public. They are a
compilation of what the families of the detenidos-desaparecidos have been
denouncing to the country, the courts of justice, the government, international
organizations, in thousands of efforts made.51
This book series is presented as the “exact reproduction” of the compiled documentation
and evidence brought by the Vicaría to the courts. In Precht’s introductory note, I recognize what
I call the photo-copy rationale of the Vicaría’s counter-archive. The acts of reproducing,
registering, certifying, compiling, and displaying both frame and enable this photo-copy
rationale.52 The photo-copy rationale—which I write purposefully with a hyphen to stress both
elements—conveys the persistent and urgent practice of reproducing, re-photographing, and
photocopying portraits and various types of documents, not only with the aim of generating and
providing counter-narratives, but also with the objective to understand how the repressive and
intelligence apparatuses of the military operated. (Where were the clandestine torture centers?
When and under what circumstances did detentions occur? Etc.). While Precht insists that the
antecedents given are “not new,” this compilation of portraits and documents was nothing short
of an event. The event, here, is the devising of the systematic visual and textual corpus ¿Dónde
están? whose impetus was the likewise systematic disappearance of people. Notwithstanding the
complete indifference of the authorities, Vicaría workers take on the task of documenting,
recording, compiling, organizing, and displaying this corpus of disappearance qua disappearance
(and not as “alleged” disappearance).

Figure 1.7. Volume 1 and 3 of ¿Dónde están? (7 volumes). November 1978. Color. Fundación
de Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad.
In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida suggests that “the technical structure of the archiving
archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into
existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records
the event.”53 What Derrida calls archivization produces the understanding of the crime of forced
disappearance as a continued event and frames it as one that should not exist. This systematic
corpus of disappearances is offered in the form of a pending question: ¿Dónde están? (Where are
they?). This question would continue to resonate, for, as Stoler observes regarding counter
archival practices, “no matter how many documents are amassed as ‘proof,’ they might not be
‘enough’ for one […] to be released from unspecified detention.”54 Precht insists indeed on the
unresolved quality of their legal endeavors, despite the data amassed and presented: attempts to
clarify the fate of the disappeared detainees “have not yielded until now any results;” “A
clarifying response […] has not yet arrived;” “Despite the quality of the documentation
presented and the efforts deployed, we have not yet obtained any kind of response.”55
Each personal file included detailed information of the disappeared person, testimonies of
relatives and/or neighbors (information such as the date the person was last seen, what he/she
was wearing, etc.) and, in most cases, a portrait photo. The elaborate display of these portraits,
some of which had already acquired new appearances due to the careful work (cuts,
enlargements, enhancements, etc.) of Vicaría photographers, urges us to consider this publication
without disregarding its visual composition (see fig. 1.7). The technical structure of the archive
(compilation, reproduction, serialization of photographic portraits, lists of names, and personal
files) structures this pending corpus (corpus pendiente) comprised of absent bodies (cuerpos
ausentes), deploying all of the available signs at the moment: photographic portraits (not always
obtainable), personal information, witness accounts of the moment of the abduction or criminal
detention, and legal and administrative actions undertaken in each case.
The tangible temporality denoted in the expression “available signs at the moment” must
be emphasized here: this pending corpus of the disappearance, this compilation of documents,
facts, and photographs, was composed before the findings of human remains at the Lonquén
mine site in November 1978 (the macabre finding occurred just weeks after the publication of
the first volume of ¿Dónde están?). The forensic investigation would determine that the human
remains found buried in the furnaces belonged to fifteen men who had been detained in different
circumstances on October 7, 1973. Their names appeared on the list of detainees who remained
disappeared as well as on the list of names published in the first volume of the ¿Dónde están?
series. Until the Lonquén findings, no institutional, governmental, or judicial framework had
recognized the legal figure of the detained-disappeared. I quote again from Precht’s Introduction
to the first volume: “Government authorities, despite all the evidence, still talk about presumed
missing persons;” “their arguments remain unclear because […] they do not refer to people who
are actually among the detained-disappeared.”56 Moreover, Reverend Father Gustavo Ferraris
maintains in the fifth volume: “They even got to claim that because of the possible game of
double identities, the disappeared were fictional characters.”57
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The arrangement of the portraits is also striking. Like the texts that state similar
variations of the same information, the same data, over and over again, the covers and interior
pages convey seriality, repetition, systematicity. These iconic portraits whisper, talk of
something that was happening and that continued to happen over and over and over again. This
visual montage is both simple and effective. Behind the austere display lies the accumulation of
information compiled, the amassed documents (file cards, photos) that refer to other documents
(in la sábana, for example), which reminds me of what Ariella Azoulay suggests regarding
Derrida’s notion of archive fever. As the critic cogently asserts, more should be said of this
notion:
Archive fever is not reducible to the claim to study documents. Archive fever is
also the claim to revolutionize the archive; the claim to a different understanding
of the documents it holds, of its supposed purpose, of the right to see them and to
act accordingly; the claim to the forms and ways of categorizing, presenting, and
using these documents. Archive fever challenges the norm that stands at the basis
of how sovereign power defines archival documents: documents the writing of
which the powers that be dictate, and later also order their hiding.58
¿Dónde están? does precisely this: it offers a different understanding of the documents the
archive holds, the documents that were prepared, compiled, and presented to the legal authorities
in hundreds of habeas corpus cases, all of which were disregarded. ¿Dónde están? offers another
way of categorizing (the individuals are presented as detained-disappeared, a category the legal
authorities disavow) and invites its readers to scrutinize the documentation it presents, also
differently. The legal illegibility of the detained-disappeared is inscribed—in order to be
contested—in the ¿Dónde están? book series. Official accounts, until that date, claimed that:
they didn’t exist; that they were never born; they are presumably dead; and even that they were
fictional characters, among other false allegations.
This legal illegibility appears in the books as a problem that affects the visual and the
textual references, and their correlation. On the one hand, this problem is made manifest in the
avowed absence of clues or traces pertaining to the whereabouts of the disappeared. Most of the
hundreds of personal files end in a similar way: “since that moment it has not been possible to
locate him in any detention site;” “despite the efforts to find his whereabouts, everything has
been useless;” “despite the innumerable efforts made, to date nothing has been known of him;”
“it was not possible to locate the whereabouts of the detainee and to this date his fate remains
ignored;” “currently, he remains missing;” “since then, nothing more has been known about
him.” Such observations are repeated over and over in the hundreds of personal files compiled in
almost two thousand pages. On the other hand, the portraits published in ¿Dónde están? appear
without names and are not necessarily ordered numerically (see fig. 1.8); in some instances, a
blank square framed in black suggests the absence of a portrait, but of whom?
Figure 1.8. ¿Dónde están? Spread. (November 1978). Black and white. Fundación de
Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad.
The visual arrangement, the repetition and juxtaposition of re-photographed photos (some
of them extremely damaged, most of them numbered) and blank framed squares, provides a
visualization of the corpus of disappearance, a corpus that searches bodies (cuerpos), a pending
corpus that demands references. The small re-photographed portraits supplement the textual
information with visual information. They supplement, that is to say, rather than complement.
Because of their supplementary condition, these small portraits inevitably enter into a
substitutive chain. This happens, if I may, at a meta level, where the reference is displaced again
and again due to the separated arrangement of texts and images. While the decision to publish
the portraits separately may have been dictated largely by economic factors (it is less expensive
to print pages with text only than pages with text and images combined), the separation of names
and personal files from portraits inevitably instigates the question about “the referent.” The
portraits (reproductions of photos in manifest poor condition, many of them altered to better
resemble an ID photo or a portrait) appear juxtaposed on the covers of each volume and also on
consecutive pages following lists of names, each of which is assigned a number corresponding to
the detainee’s file.

¿Dónde están? is a revealing instance of the portraits’ displacements. Material objects,
the portraits were displaced in different stages—from the family album to the streets, from the
streets to the photographic archive, and from the archive back again to the streets, via signs,
leaflets, magazines, and books. ID photos experienced further displacements in relation to their
use value (from disciplinary to commemorative). The relatives of the victims re-appropriated a
visual document whose first and primary objective is to serve as proof of identification,
bestowing ordinary ID photo portraits with an aura and a humanity that was lacking in their
original form. There are also displacements of a different order involving subjects (both the
subjects photographed and spectators), times (both past and present), spaces (both the space
photographed as well as the space of publication or exhibition, both physical and virtual spaces),
and materials (film, negatives, papers, etc.). Meanwhile, the photographed subjects also
experienced material displacements (from flesh and bones to the negative, and from the negative
to paper), as well as successive temporal and spatial displacements reactivated in each of the
instances in which the portraits are watched, re-photographed, or photocopied. The different
stages that comprise the photo-copy rationale—the many displacements the subjects
photographed have endured both before and after the first photographic take, and the
transformations of the “original” photos from which some of the portraits are made—seem to
move the portraits, and the subjects, away from us. However, the evocative force of these
portraits—which is apparent both in the haunting power of the “fleeting expression of their
human faces,” as Benjamin might put it, and in the feeble physical marks that despite the
amends, the re-photographing and the retouching, are still visible in these portraits—brings them
closer, again.
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<d> Touching Photocopies
The portraits, which were displaced from family albums and ID cards into the streets, and
from there into the archives, magazines, and a book series, were also integrated into artistic
practices.59 In this penultimate section, I continue developing the notion of the photo-copy
rationale to illuminate further the performative dimension of the documentary practices of
photography under the dictatorship. I consider, in particular, the collaborative practice of two
artists, Luz Donoso and Hernán Parada, who endeavored to put the portraits of the desaparecidos
back into circulation. The artists resorted to photocopying and re-photographing to disseminate,
display, and activate the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared. A core motivation of
their collaborative work was to impact and engage passersby on the streets. Needless to say,
there are hundreds of photocopies for which no register remains, which cannot be seen, which
have been lost (recording, visuality, and loss—all these notions are closely related to the photo-
copy rationale). I am thinking here of those ephemeral objects that were never consigned to
archives, those photocopies that were not made to remain, but to destabilize—albeit briefly—a
besieged urban landscape. All that remains of the hundreds of posters pasted on walls and
photocopied leaflets left on windshields and thrown into the air during rallies and marches is
their audiovisual or photographic documentation.60
As stated earlier, Donoso and Parada were in charge of re-photographing, organizing, and
classifying the portraits received from family members at the Agrupación. Donoso put herself to
the task of making enlarged photocopies of the portraits. She began confectioning different tapes
by attaching all the enlarged copies together. She created different variations of the tape, which
she titled “Huincha sin fin. Hasta que nos digan dónde están” (Endless tape. Until we are told
where they are). The title of the piece was not figurative. It aimed to convey the
incommensurability of the project, its indefectible in-progress character: every day another
relative came with news of a disappeared family member, every day another old ID picture or
family album photo needed to be re-photographed, photocopied, enlarged. So the “Endless tape”
kept growing and growing. The tapes had “papers, photos attached, pamphlets of marches,
photocopies of newspapers depicting a piece that is multiplied, handwritten script.”61 As Paulina
Varas explains, “Endless tape” was exhibited in art spaces and museums in Chile and abroad, but
also, “and perhaps more insistently, in places of denunciation, in exhibits or spaces where family
members of the detained-disappeared and human rights organizations gathered to protest, and on
the street itself, emerging whenever it was possible to unravel it. Never in the same way, it
appeared vitalized by the event that made it unfold.”62
Figure 1.9. Photographic documentation of “Huincha sin fin.” Black and white. Credit: Luz
Donoso. Luz Donoso’s archive (courtesy of Jenny Holmgren).
What remains of the “Endless tape,” for all of us to see, is a series of photographs. One of
them depicts the tape extending the length of a staircase (see fig. 1.9). The photograph itself
provides an example of the portraits’ displacements and performativity. The photo expresses the
impossibility of viewing the entire photographic archive simultaneously. Due to the incessant
proliferation of portraits, the photograph of the action signals the non-closure of the sequence
and insists, as does the tape itself, on the incommensurability of state terrorism: Hasta que nos
digan dónde están. The photographer cropped out of the frame the heads of the figures grabbing
the “endless tape,” showing only their bodies. As in the case of Navarro’s portrait, this forces us
to focus our attention on the re-photographed faces of those who seem to ask about their own
bodies: “Where are they?” The only eyes that return our gaze, even if from afar, are those of the
people whose ID photos have been photo-copied: re-photographed, enlarged, printed, and
photographed again.
In addition to creating several versions of “Endless tape,” Donoso collaborated with other
artists at the TAV—Hernán Parada, Patricia Saavedra, and Elías Adasme, among others—in
various art actions in which portraits played a central role. Such is the case of “Acciones de
Apoyo: intervención de un sistema comercial” (Supporting Actions: intervention of a
commercial system) (1979) and “Acciones de Apoyo: intervención fotográfica de un muro”
(Supporting Actions: photographic intervention of a wall) (1982). In a brief statement featured in
Ruptura (CADA’s publication) in 1982, the artists point out that media “are the necessary nexus
to materialize an action. Although they are indispensable in order to make-register-show and/or
disseminate some action or theoretical material, they are not in themselves an artwork (although
their influence exists), but rather elements/tools at the artwork’s service.”63 The statement
emphasizes the role of media—photography and video—as disseminating tools. Photographs are
disseminated and help to disseminate further at the same time: some of the portraits used for
these actions, and which through these actions were disseminated even further, were produced by
copying and re-photographing portraits reproduced—i.e., previously disseminated—in the
¿Dónde están? series.
In “Supporting Actions: intervention of a commercial system,” the portrait of a
disappeared woman, whose name is Lila Valdenegro, interrupted for a few minutes the
programmed sequence of images exhibited on the television screens in a store display in Paseo
Ahumada, in downtown Santiago (see fig 1.10).64 The image of this face irrupted into an
environment besieged by a system that tried to make precisely this type of image invisible.65 In
this action, television and photography are put “at the service of the artwork” as a means of
dissemination. Photography also served as a means to document the action. As Parada recalls,
“Talking to Patricia Saavedra, the idea came up to put photos of the detained-disappeared on
televisions inside electronic stores. Patricia entered and negotiated with the clerks […] and then
we photographed the images appearing in the display windows. We had to ask fast.”66 The
photographic and sonorous documentation of these interventions was a key aspect of the work;
many actions were performed for the camera. The photographic documentation of these actions
intensifies the dissemination and proliferation of the portraits even further.
Figure 1.10. Photographic documentation of “Acciones de Apoyo: Intervención de un sistema

comercial.” 1979. Black and white. Credit: Luz Donoso. Luz Donoso’s archive (courtesy of
Jenny Holmgren).
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Photography has been described as a second skin, a very apt metaphor when considering
the photographic portrait. But what happens in this case? Where is that portrait? How did it get
there? The supposed materiality of the photographic trace diffuses and multiplies in the very
image that tries to bring to us, spectators, the face of a disappeared woman. If at the moment of
the action some passerby had the opportunity to view the portrait—which, it goes without saying,
is ultra-mediated as it is an image that has been re-photographed or photocopied, taped on video,
projected on a TV screen, and exhibited in a display window—it comes to us mediated one more
time through yet another lens, that of the camera capturing the action. It is worthwhile recalling
here the idea of the portrait as the staging of a becoming, as a multiplying force rather than as a
single reflection. Because, what is, after all, the referent of this photograph? Is it the woman’s
face on the screen, the TV sets, or that polishing machine that appears out of focus on the left
side of the display window? Is the display window itself the referent? How many layers or
“skins” mediate the spectator’s view of the woman’s face? The photo of the action displays a
reflection—perhaps involuntarily—on the immaterial condition of the photographic trace.
Furthermore, it illustrates the “putting into crisis of a temporal order in which first there is an
object and then later its representation.”67
For the action “Supporting Actions: photographic intervention of a wall” (1982), the
artists pasted the photocopied portrait of another disappeared person on a wall in downtown
Santiago (see fig. 1.11). By directing our attention to the photographs that documented the
action, it is possible to appreciate the many ways in which the portrait was displaced, activating
memory and its political potentials. In its displacement, the photocopied portrait depicted in the
photograph stimulated collective memory by interpellating the passerby directly, enabling the
expansion of her consciousness, as Varas also argues.68 We must also emphasize that in
“Photographic intervention of a wall” the displacement operated not only at the spatial level—
the portrait of the desaparecido appears where there should not be any image, i.e., on the street
wall—but also at a symbolic-referential level.
Figure 1.11. Photographic documentation of “Acciones de Apoyo: Intervención fotográfica de un

muro.” 1979 Black and white. Credit: Luz Donoso. Luz Donoso’s archive (courtesy of Jenny
Holmgren).
The permanence of the photocopied portrait was undetermined. Given the socio-political
context, this photocopied portrait glued to a wall acquired a particular symbolic and political
depth. While the passersby who were confronted by the photocopy on the wall (we can see some
of them in the photographs) could not identify the person depicted in the portrait, the vast
majority of them most likely (rightly) anticipated it belonged to one of the thousands who
disappeared at the hands of the dictatorship. This sort of fundamental anticipation (which is also
at play in the action discussed earlier) illustrates the imaginary and symbolic burden borne by
these portraits. The portrait interpellated the passerby, who turned towards the image glued to the
wall because of what it represented: the fact of abduction and disappearance. While the subject’s
identity remained unknown to the viewer, the acknowledgment of the subject’s legal status—
disappeared—enabled a transitory frame of reference.

In some photographs, the movement of out-of-focus passersby is juxtaposed with the
complete steadiness of the small portrait that seems to almost disappear in the vastness of the
wall. In this way the photographs express the coexistence of two temporalities: the temporality of
everyday life which does not stop, which continues its course, and the suspended temporality of
the portrait, manifestly expressed in the suspension of the photocopy in the middle of the wall.
This photocopy, which (timidly) interrupts the continuity of the wall in downtown Santiago, is an
illustrative instance of displacement. Although it is the portrait of a specific disappeared person, I
cannot help but think, as I view it, of the hundreds of faces of disappeared people who appeared
every day in leaflets, signs, and printed media. But this small portrait suspended in time and
space moves me. The name of the man in the photocopied portrait is Francisco Juan González
Ortiz. This individual was detained on September 9, 1976. I found his name, portrait, and
personal file while examining volume two of ¿Dónde están? in which he appears listed as
detained-disappeared number 120. Despite this specificity, the portrait will not stop
supplementing itself; it will not stop supplementing the act of disappearance either.
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The final corpus of photographs I examine are photographic records of a sequence of
actions within Hernán Parada’s project “Obrabierta A” (Open Work A) (1974–present). These
actions reactivate the iconic power of the photographic portrait, by embodying it. Alejandro
Parada, Hernán Parada’s brother, was detained and disappeared on July 31, 1974. In 1984, to
commemorate the tenth anniversary of his brother’s disappearance, Hernán devised a
photocopied mask, which he obtained by photo-copying a portrait of his brother. The production
of the mask entailed various stages. About the overall project, Luz Donoso would say: “The pain
gave Hernán Parada the lucidity to make a precious “Obrabierta A” that keeps incorporating
what happens with the detained-disappeared, infinite variations that add up to a work that does
not end, that remains in time, unfinished until he decides to end it, perhaps when he finds his
brother.”69 The passage illustrates the affinities of Donoso’s and Parada’s practices: there is no
doubt that “Obrabierta A” shared the impetus that also animated Donoso’s “Endless tape.”
Between July and December 1984, Parada performed at various emblematic public
spaces with the mask on: the building of the Courts Justice, the Train Central Station, the Plaza
de Armas, the School of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Chile. Luz Donoso and Víctor
Hugo Codocedo accompanied Parada to document these ephemeral public appearances with
audio recorders and cameras. Other locations included the TAV (November 1984), Parada’s own
house (December 1984), the Patio 29 of the General Cemetery (May 1985) (see fig 1.12), the
workshop of photographer Adriana Silva (July 1985), the Estación Mapocho Cultural Center
(July 1985), and the residence of video artist Gloria Camiruaga (July 1986).70 At Silva’s
workshop, Parada posed for the photos that I introduced at the beginning of the chapter, where
Parada, always wearing Alejandro’s mask, gestures in front of the camera that he can’t hear,
speak, or see (see fig 1.1). Nobody wants to talk or hear about the disappeared, no one sees what
is going on, the masked man seems to be saying.71 The photo also allows for a different reading:
Alejandro, the disappeared, is the one who can’t hear, speak, or see because he is in a sort of in-
between, in an uncertain place, neither dead nor alive.

Figure 1.12. Photographic documentation of “Obrabierta A” (1974–present). Patio 29, General

Cemetery. May 1985. Credit: Luz Donoso. Black and white. Hernan Parada’s personal archive.
This is precisely what “Alejandro” shared in his different appearances. For instance,
inside the main hall of the Courts of Justice building, he recited the following:
Gentlemen of the Court, I am Alejandro Parada. I am a veterinary student. Today
is the tenth anniversary of my detention and disappearance. I come here to ask
that you not forget about us. We who have been detained and disappeared do not
deserve to live in this situation. We are denied life, and we are denied death. We
have the right to one thing: we want to know if we are dead or if we are alive. It is
painful to live in uncertainty. Do not forget us.72
According to Parada, the intention behind going to the Courts of Justice with the mask on, was
that a disappeared person should ask others about people like himself. This shifted the locus of
enunciation from a collective “¿Dónde están?” (Where are they?) to the first person “¿Dónde
estoy?” (Where am I?). This shift in the locus of enunciation is significant because it calls
attention to what Diana Taylor calls “percepticide” at a personal, subjective level. The
displacement instigated both collective and individual awareness: if I do not know where I am—
because I am disappeared—then, where are you, and where are we? “Dónde estás?” “¿Dónde
estamos?” In other words, what country am I (are you/are we) in that would inflict terrors such as
that of disappearing its citizens and denying closure to loved ones of the deceased? Something
similar occurred at the Veterinary school where Alejandro Parada was a student until 1974 (he
was, like many others, exonerated from school by the military). There, “Alejandro” talked and
tried to engage staff and students (see fig 1.13). He asked them for help to resolve “the
uncertainty” in which he found himself.
Figure 1.13. Photographic documentation of “Obrabierta A” (1974–present). Veterinary School,

Universidad de Chile. July 1984. Credit: Victor Hugo Codocedo. Black and white. Hernan
Parada’s personal archive.
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In these different actions, the identification between photographic portrait and subject—
between Alejandro’s mask and Alejandro as a person—is performed and embodied; the
loving/photographic act entails, here, becoming other.73 Indeed, “Obrabierta A” illuminates the
idea of the photograph or, in this case, the photocopy—it does not matter—as a force of
transformation at its purest: with the mask on, Hernán becomes Alejandro. Because not only the
disappeared person mutates, but also the relative who searches for him. Hernán is transformed by
giving body and voice to Alejandro, whose body has disappeared and whose voice has been
silenced. The photographs that document Hernán Parada’s actions illustrate the irruption (in the
most literal sense of the word) of photocopied portraits in the middle of urban everyday life.
Although this irruption can be appreciated in each photograph, it acquires a different
depth in the photograph taken at the Central Train Station, where Parada, wearing Alejandro’s
mask, almost blends in with the other faces (see fig 1.14). Notably, the people surrounding
Parada seem not to notice the presence of this strange subject. Also, the mask is the only face
“looking” at the camera. Indeed, I consider the photographic documentation of these different
public appearances as portraits. Insubordinate portraits that inscribe the unexpected appearance
of a disappeared person in the public space, these photographs also belong to the expanding
photographic archive of the detained-disappeared. Parada, wearing Alejandro’s mask, poses for
the photographer (Luz Donoso).

Figure 1.14. Photographic documentation of “Obrabierta A” (1974-present). Central Station.

December 1984. Credit: Luz Donoso. Black and white. Hernan Parada’s personal archive.
These photographic registers of the action stage the question about identity differently
than the actions themselves. They make us think of that impossibility of recognizing oneself in
the portrait, an idea contended by Benjamin and Barthes alike. The subject appears hidden; the
photograph does not show him—it only shows us his mask. “[The] photograph is the advent of
myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness.”74 In the encounter between
photographic portrait and mask, the photographs display the non-coincidence between a subject
and their portrait. By entering the photographic space, the subject loses her identity.75 This loss
appears doubly displayed in the photographic images of Parada’s action—doubly, because the
portrayed subject wears a mask. At the same time, the photographic portrait—and this may
appear paradoxical—seems to resist this dissolution: the mask returns our gaze.
These portraits of photocopied faces wandering about the city, in their crossing of alterity
and the auratic, in their effacing of the photographic trace, in their subtle rendering of the
ineffability of loss and of becoming other, avow that even when the photocopy of a portrait does
not carry with it the trace of the subject, it still can acquire life by, paradoxically, becoming
iconic mask. In a brief, but provocative essay entitled “El xenotafio de luz” (The light xenotaph),
critic and philosopher Willy Thayer makes the following case regarding the reproduction of an
image from a previous photograph:
The artistic process that usually goes from the living light to the negative and
from the negative to the photograph inverts itself. In this irregular case, it is the
light already embalmed in a photograph that travels towards the negative, and
from the latter towards its multiple reproduction. The negative derived from a
photograph does not host, then, the light of a living face; it hosts, rather, the
somber nature of an inert paper.76
Is it odd to include in (and conclude) a chapter about the composition of the photographic
archive of the detained-disappeared, photographs that displace even further the re-photographed
and photocopied portraits, photographs of photocopied masks, inert paper? Is it odd to feel
moved by a photocopied mask? I ask these questions, because before Thayer’s arguments,
Alejandro’s photocopied mask could be seen as a superfluous prop that makes an icon of a real,
“flesh-and-blood” disappeared person. The photocopied mask and the photograph of the
photocopied mask seem to take the “real subject”—Alejandro Parada—even further away from
us; they seem to occlude his luminous trace.
The photocopied mask surely intensifies the iconic aspect of the photographic portrait; I
say intensify because, as I have already emphasized, photographic portraits are always iconic.
The link between referent and portrait is very strong in contexts of forced disappearance—these
images move us, they touch us. But this touch expands beyond the physical: memory and
imagination are also intimately related to these portraits. “Imagination,” as Georges Didi-
Huberman observes, “is not a withdrawal to the mirages of a single reflection, as is too often
thought. It is often a composition and a montage of various forms placed in correspondence with
one another. This is why, far from being an artist’s privilege or a purely subjectivist recognition,
it is an integral part of knowledge in its most fertile, albeit most daring, movement.”77
Imagination is in fact a critical tool to become involved with these re-photographed and
photocopied portraits. As Marianne Hirsch stresses, photographs enable us “in the present, not
only to see and to touch that past, but also to try to reanimate it.”78 Hernán Parada pushes the
evocative force of the portrait to the limit. With the mask on, he becomes his brother. The act
enlivens the photocopied mask, a piece of inert paper: it transforms it into photocopied skin.
Thus, despite Déotte’s emphasis on the ethical dimension of the photographic trace (commented
on earlier) and Thayer’s suggestive claim regarding the inert quality of the photocopy,
Alejandro’s photocopied mask has much to teach us about the performativity and the persistence
of the photographic portraits of the detained-disappeared. Although many of the portraits that
continue to circulate originated in what Thayer refers to as “the somber nature of an inert
paper”—in other words, despite the fact that these documents do not refer us directly towards a
flesh and blood subject—the photocopied and re-photographed portraits kept (and continue to
hold) their value as objects of living memory. The portraits of the detained-disappeared persisted
by means of composition, duplication, and dislocation: they were enhanced, copied, classified,
and consigned to the photographic archive, but they did not remain there, lightless and
motionless. On the contrary, they continued circulating; they kept being disseminated and
multiplied.
Alejandro’s photocopied mask indeed oriented my exploration of the composition and
dissemination of the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared from the start. This iconic
photocopied mask and the history of its composition—which in a way condenses the histories of
the successive reproductions, alterations, and displacements endured by so many portraits—

inspired the critical reflection I have developed here. How could it not be like this, if Alejandro’s
photocopied mask is intimately related to the contact-sheet I mentioned at the beginning of the
chapter? While completing the research for this chapter, I emailed Parada. I expressed my
interest in his resort to photocopying and asked him where he had obtained the source photo. I
cannot but quote his reply in full:
From September 1973 to March 1974, Alejandro Parada González hid in his
sister-in-law’s house, located in the Central Station neighborhood of Villa
Francia, Santiago. In that house, the husband of his sister-in-law, who was a
family photographer, took several photos of the couple, Alejandro and Angélica.
Angélica submitted one of these photos to the Vicaría archive so it could be
published in a number of little books about the disappeared, ¿Dónde están?,
which began to emerge in the late 1970s with the story of each desaparecido.
Several books were published by the Vicaría. Eventually an edition came out with
the information about my brother, Alejandro. I decided to take his photo [from the
book]. Because the image was diagrammed in black and white dots, I was able to
expand it better. First, I re-photographed the image and began to expand it, to play
with it… This first enlargement of 22 by 27 inches was mounted on a piece of
plywood. From that piece I obtained an image which I used in important places
around the city in different actions focusing on Alejandro’s face…After this first
incursion with the enlarged image of Alejandro, the idea emerged to Xerox the
photograph in regular size, in real scale [1:1]. Since I already had this image, I
was captivated by the possibility of taking this further. I decided thus, intimately,
fraternally, to lend my body to Alejandro. I would have to feel and think as my

brother would, wearing a mask of his face. While wearing this mask, I would be
Alejandro, conceptually. I talked about this idea with my friend, Luz Donoso, and
she was as delighted as I was to do something with this new and so significant use
of a photograph. We thought about going out, along with Alejandro.79
The portraits, no matter how displaced and transformed, carry within them a referential force.
This referential force puts photos, referents, and us—the beholders—in motion. The
performative force of Alejandro’s mask led me from a number of photos documenting an artistic
action, to a photo I found in Elías Adasme’s personal archive (fig. 1.15). The photo depicts
Adasme, Donoso, and Parada holding the plywood matrix of Alejandro’s portrait that was used
to make the first enlarged copies of Alejandro’s portrait. This photo, in turn, led me to the high-
contrast portrait reproduced in volume 3 of ¿Dónde están? (see fig. 1.8) and, ultimately, to the
photographic archive of the Vicaría.
Figure 1.15. Hernán Parada, Luz Donoso, and Elías Adasme at Taller de Artes Visuales (TAV).
Color. Elías Adasme’s personal archive.
Figure 1.16. Alejandro Parada’s photo identification card at the Fundación de Documentación y
Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad. Color. Photograph: Ángeles Donoso Macaya.
I encountered Alejandro’s card file at the Vicaría’s photographic archive in 2015 (see fig. 1.16).
The card had attached a contact-sheet (the source photograph) consisting of two copies of a
portrait of Alejandro and his girlfriend Angélica. Looking at this file card, I thought of this: a
couple’s portrait, taken as a memento, was re-photographed and cropped at the Vicaría offices to
show only Alejandro’s face in the style of a portrait, so that the disappeared person could be
identified more easily; this new photo, which looked more like an ID photo, was consigned into
archive and also published in ¿Dónde están?; the published portrait (shown in reverse because it
is a negative of the contact-sheet) was in turn re-photographed, enlarged, and further
manipulated by a group of artists; the newly obtained image was transferred onto different
canvases and was later made into a photocopied mask; photographs of the artist wearing the
photocopied mask were made—photographs that I observe today, in the present. I kept
reminding myself of this sequence of transformations as I began to elucidate the composition of
the expanding photographic archive of the detained-disappeared, as I explored the different
materialities and formal qualities of these portraits—performative iconic traces with immense
memorial force. By following the path of this displaced, performative trace, I was able to grasp
the different materialities, spaces, individuals, affects, and senses (vision, tact, sound) implicated
in the photographic practice.
Parada’s embodiment of Alejandro’s portrait invites us to think of all the portraits of the
detained-disappeared as the staging of a becoming that, while appearing to direct our attention at
a first moment towards that which has been, in fact opens the photographed subject to the
potentiality of a time to come at the very same time it multiplies it. This loving/photographic act
transforms not only the portrayed subject, but the beholder as well. In the context we are
addressing, the logic of transformation and metamorphosis distinctive to the photographic
becoming was even more significant in that it impacted the materiality of the source photographs
without disturbing the affect. Spouses, lovers, siblings, children, and other relatives were
cropped out of some photographs. New photo-copied portraits emerged, which were in turn
retouched, enlarged, enhanced. These new portraits were disseminated and continue traveling
through both time and space via new photographs.
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It would be absurd to negate the link between portrait and photographed subject.
Nevertheless, in positing and considering this linkage, we ought to pay attention to the haunting
and evocative powers of the photographed, re-photographed, photocopied, and enlarged portrait
as well as to its materiality. I have attempted here to consider the truth-value of the photographic
portrait in different forms and materialities, starting with the logic of its displacements and
unraveling it from the theoretical constraints of the photographic trace. Thus, I shall conclude by
underscoring the performativity of the photographic portraits of the disappeared. The different
processes involved in the photo-copy rationale that instigate, structure, and keep nurturing the
expanding photographic archive illuminate the referential performativity of the photograph. This
performance of referentiality becomes apparent each time photos are displayed and presented as
visual evidence. As I have argued, it was not “indexicality” that bestowed on these persistent
portraits their evidentiary documentary value. The photocopies and the re-photographed photos
do not bear the trace of the persons they represent—but they do resemble them, they even
conjure them. The performance of these iconic photographic portraits begins and concludes with
their public display; this performance encompasses their composition, presentation, and
recognition qua photographic portraits of the disappeared, their material and formal
transformations, and their displacements inside and out of the photographic archive. This
performance is also manifested then in the ability of photographs to move, migrate, and be
transformed into something else (photocopies, for instance).
Visual and performance studies scholars have not failed to underscore the political aspect
that underlies the public display of the portraits. Diana Taylor elucidates in The Archive and the
Repertoire the ways in which the Madres used the portraits to interrupt and destabilize the
hegemony of the official archive in Argentina: “Instead of the body in the archive associated
with surveillance and police strategies, [the mothers] staged the archive in/on the body, affirming
that embodied performance could make visible that which had been purged from the archive.”80
My analysis of the photographic archive composed by the Vicaría in Chile nuances the kind of
exclusive assimilation Taylor formulates between archival and surveillance practices. The
Vicaría’s tasks of compiling, composing, and disseminating the photographic archive of the
detained-disappeared was an effective and necessary counter-archival strategy to resist
repression, challenge official versions regarding the disappeared, and formulate other narratives
and explanations. By analyzing how private family snapshots, portraits, and ID photos became
performative icons of the victims of the repression, I have recovered the simultaneously
important politico-memorial and iconographic role of the Vicaría in the composition of the
photographic archive of the portraits of the disappeared. Meanwhile, Andrea Noble studies the
“mode of photographic display qua political tactic […] across the subcontinent.”81 Her analysis
underscores the public display that is performed for the camera as an effective strategy. My
reading of the photographs that document the public demonstrations and artistic interventions in
which the portraits were exhibited, used, and embodied builds on (and expands) Noble’s key
consideration of the performativity intrinsic to the photographic display. My analysis of these
photographs enriches the prevailing understandings of the practice of photography as
performance and as a form of protest. My reading attests to both the persistent presence of these
portraits in the public space as well as to their intrinsic performativity. As we have seen, the
iconicity, symbolism, and documentary value of these portraits triggered further displacements
and disseminations in the public space. These displacements and disseminations, in turn,
materialize the persistence of the portrait. Persistence is commonly defined as the sustained
existence of something; it also refers to the firm continuance in a course of action in spite of
difficulty or opposition. Regarding the portraits of the disappeared, their “continuance... in spite
of” is precisely what is at stake. Even when political and economic circumstances conditioned
and transformed the materiality of the source photos, the faces reproduced in photocopies and
photographs of photographs—visual objects in which it would not be possible to trace any
(photographic) trace—continued to be utilized to call attention to the paradoxical existence of the
desaparecidos and to refute the official versions given by military officials who, in some cases,
went so far as to deny the legal existence of some of the victims.

The display and embodiment of portraits in the public space promoted affective
interactions, re-activated the work of individual and collective memory, and also enabled a
transitory frame of reference at a time when all referential frames seemed to have been
suspended. The displacements experienced by the persistent portraits studied here were of
different orders—including spatial, temporal, material, and referential displacements. These
displacements draw the contours of a dynamic visual archive comprising the portraits of
disappeared individuals, documentation of artistic actions, and portraits of masked subjects—all
images that activate our photographic memory and acquire new depths when read together. In
this expanding archive comprised of re-photographed and photocopied photographs, and
photocopied and re-photographed masks, there is no difference between living light and dead
light. The only seemingly immutable phenomenon is the affective bond those distant faces
establish with us in the present, luminous faces whose traits are repeated and accentuated on the
iconic surfaces of the reproduced portraits. According to Benjamin, due to the long period of
exposure required in early photography, “the subject (as it were) grew into the picture.” In a way,
the long, persistent display of the portraits of the disappeared in the public space makes (as it
were) their iconic faces grow—it keeps them present, gives them light, and multiplies them.
1
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Spanish are my own. Ana González González was a human-rights
activist, and member of the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (AFDD) (Association of Family
Members of the Detained-Disappeared) since 1976. She was the wife of Manuel Recabarren Rojas, mother of Luis
Recabarren González and Manuel Recabarren González, and mother-in-law of Nalvia Mena Alvarado—all of whom
are detained-disappeared. González passed away on October 26, 2018. The passage quoted in the epigraph is from
González’s interview with Sebastián Moreno in the documentary La ciudad de los fotógrafos.
2
The Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation states that the National Stadium
“became by far the largest detention site in this region with more than seven thousand detainees by September 22
according to the International Red Cross. Between two and three hundred of these were foreigners from a variety of
nations. […] People from all over Santiago, who had been arrested in many different circumstances, were
transferred there.” (182). However, as Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles emphasizes in Terrorismo de Estadio (2016),
giving an exact total number of the detainees who remained in the National Stadium is impossible. The official
figure that the military junta gave at the time was seven thousand prisoners and a list published in 2000 by former
director of the DINA Manuel Contreras indicates that there were nine thousand detainees (2). Meanwhile, Bonnefoy
indicates that former detainees agree that the total number of prisoners may have been easily double that—about
twenty thousand. As for the people executed at the Stadium, Bonnefoy records forty-five executions (four more
executions than those documented in the Report of the Chilean National Commission), but again, she stresses that
this figure does not include the dozens of victims who were executed and then made disappeared (their bodies
thrown in common graves, the Mapocho river, etc.). Carmen Luz Parot’s 2003 documentary Estadio Nacional also
sheds light on the story of this emblematic sports-center turned concentration camp. Parot interviews thirty-five
survivors on camera and tours the Stadium with some of them.
3
Sebastián Moreno and Claudia Barril’s documentary Habeas Corpus (2015) includes archival audiovisual footage
and photographs not previously seen, taken both inside and outside the Stadium. A particularly moving sequence
shows the moment at which dozens of prisoners are released from the National Stadium. Some women with children
in their arms run both excitedly and in tears to greet and hug their loved ones who are leaving the stadium in an
orderly line, while other women walk in circles, desperately looking for their loved ones among the people.
4
See Leiva Quijada, Luis Navarro: La potencia de la memoria, 15-16.
5
Exonerated artists and professors from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile, where Luz Donoso had been
a professor and Hernán Parada a student, formed the TAV in 1974. The TAV received the support of the Archbishop
of Santiago, and the embassies of France and England, among other institutions. Paulina Varas tells the story and
comments on the work and actions organized by this collaborative workshop in her book Luz Donoso. El arte y la
acción en el presente, a moving study of Luz Donoso’s noteworthy documentary work (108–124).
6
As Ann Laura Stoler argues in “On Archiving as Dissensus,” “That of which the act of ‘countering’ consists is
neither self-evident nor a decided affair. To seek the inverse of what an institutional or colonial state archive
demands is not enough: ‘to counter’ can take on multiple forms” (46). My reading of the work done by the Vicaría
as a form of counter-archival practice follows closely the ideas developed by Stoler and also by Ariella Azoulay in
“Archive.”
7
The audiovisual archive of artistic interventions and public demonstrations is extensive and continues to be
studied. In my interviews with Luis Navarro (10-VII-16, 3-X-18, 4-XI-18, and 17-XII-18) and Helen Hughes (20-
VIII-2018 and 22-XII-2018), the photographers recalled different occasions on which members of the Agrupación
had notified them in advance of where and when a particular demonstration was going to take place, so they could
be there on time with their cameras ready to document the action. Regarding the artistic field, there exists extensive
documentation about the collective C.A.D.A. (see, for instance, Robert Neustadt, CADA día: la creación de un arte
social; Nelly Richard, Márgenes e Instituciones). Luz Donoso, moreover, documented numerous artistic
interventions—including Parada’s actions with the mask—and public demonstrations organized by the Agrupación.
Varas includes these actions in her book. See Varas, Luz Donoso, 124–138 and 188–191.
8
The word evident comes from the Latin evidens, which refers to something obvious to the eye or mind.
9
Gilles Deleuze explores (and defamiliarizes) the surface in Francis Bacon. Giuliana Bruno, reading Deleuze,
reminds us that “surface matters,” beginning with “the surface as it contains the face. We rarely think about this, but
the face is our primary form of communication and also contains the traces of our life history. It is a drawing of what
we live through, a map of our own history.” See Giuliana Bruno by Sarah Oppenheimer (Interview).
10
In the second part of this chapter, I will comment on some of the formulations by Nelly Richard, Andrea Noble,
Diana Taylor, and others.
11
Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 514.
12
For instance: “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder
feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which
reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-
forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.” “Little History of
Photography,” 510.
13
Benjamin offered different formulations for the concept of the aura. One of the most elucidating ones appears in
“The Work of Art” essay, where he defines the aura (in a footnote) as “the unique apparition of a distance, however
near it might be,” and adds, “the essentially distant is the unapproachable.” See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” f11, 272.
14
Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 518.
15
Ibid., 517.
16
Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 17.
17
Ibid., 30.
18
Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 140. While the topics studied by Poole do not bear a direct relation
with the topics I explore in the present book, her important (and right on point) criticism of Sekula’s genealogy must
be emphasized. Poole urges us to consider more critically the erasure of the colonial visual archive from traditional
histories of photography.
19
Noble, “Travelling Theories of Family Photography and the Material Culture of Human Rights in Latin America,”
51, 44. Noble follows here Hirsch’s formulations regarding the family snapshot, a highly coded and conventional
artifact.
20
Noble, “Travelling Theories,” 44.
21
Da Silva Catela, “Lo invisible revelado. El uso de fotografías como (re)presentación de la desaparición de
personas en Argentina,” 337.
22
Gabriel Gatti considers the paradoxical figure of the detained-disappeared from a sociological perspective in the
Argentinean and Uruguayan context in Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and
Meaning. See also Vikki Bell, “On Fernando’s Photograph: The Biopolitics of Aparición in
Contemporary Argentina;” Jean-Louis Déotte, “El arte en la época de la desaparición;” Macarena Gómez-Barris,
Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile; Andrea Noble, “Travelling Theories;” Nelly Richard,
“Imagen, recuerdo y borraduras;” Ludmila Da Silva Catela, “Lo invisible revelado;” Diana Taylor, Disappearing
Acts.
23
Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 140. Emphasis in the original.
24
Ibid., 142.
25
See Introduction.
26
Déotte, “El arte en la época de la desaparición,” 156.
27
Ibid.
28
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80.
29
Regarding the influence of theoretical formulations about photography in the Chilean artistic field, see Ibelber
Avelar, “La escena de Avanzada. Photography and Writing in Postcoup Chile—A Conversation with Nelly
Richard.” For a contextualization of CAL, see Nicolás Raveau, Revista CAL, una historia.
30
Richard, “Imagen-recuerdo y borraduras,” 166. Emphasis added.
31
About this issue, see also Luis Ignacio García and Ana Longoni, “Imágenes invisibles. Acerca de las fotos de
desaparecidos.”
32
Kerry Bystrom, “Memoria, fotografía y legibilidad en las obras de Marcelo Brodsky y León Ferrari,” 318, 320.
According to Bystrom, “from the moment these [photos] are taken as indisputable evidence and as emotional
connections with the disappeared—and because, in this sense, they have been so successful that they tend to carry a
‘pre-packaged’ political meaning—there is a danger that, rather than encouraging an interaction with the past, they
will make it more difficult” (318).
33
By December 1975 “The Pro Peace committee had filed 2,342 habeas corpus petitions—only 3 received judicial
acceptance—and had knowledge of 920 persons long arrested and disappeared but about whom state authorities
disavowed knowledge.” Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 104.
34
The passage quoted is from Egaña Barahona’s interview with Sebastián Moreno and Claudia Barril in the
documentary Habeas Corpus (2015).
35
Newsstands did not sell Solidaridad. It was distributed through subscription, churches, trade unions, universities,
neighborhood organizations, and parishes in many poor communities all over the country.
36
Luis Navarro started to work at the Vicaría in 1976. At the beginning, he worked designing informative contents.
Since he usually carried his camera when visiting through the parishes, they invited him to also work as a
photographer for the magazine. His photographs began to appear in number six of the magazine. See Gonzalo Leiva
Quijada, Luis Navarro, 13.
37
Gonzalo Torres, Jorge Rojas, and Washington Apablaza designed these publications; Navarro and Hughes
provided feedback and ideas. Hughes, interview (20-VIII-2018 and 22-XII-2018); Navarro, interview (3-X-18, 4-
XI-18, and 17-XII-18). See also Consuelo Pérez Mendoza, Los protagonistas de la prensa alternativa: Vicaría de la
Solidaridad y Fundación de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas; Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 115–22.
38
Helen Hughes, interviews, 20-VIII-2018 and 22-XII-2018.
39
Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, 8.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
The passage quoted is from Contreras’s interview in Moreno and Barril’s documentary Habeas Corpus, which
centers on the archival and legal work done by the Vicaría (several people who worked there are interviewed on
camera). Emphasis added.
43
Habeas Corpus includes archival footage in which Vicaría workers are seen checking information in la sábana.
44
About the Vicaría’s documentation and archival work, see also Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 154–55 and
393-95.
45
Navarro, interview, 10-VII-16.
46
The Cuatro Álamos Detention Center was part of the Tres Álamos Detainee Camp. The former was clandestine,
administered by the DINA, while the latter was considered public and was under the charge of the Carabineros de
Chile. Cuatro Álamos and Tres Alamos functioned from 1974 to 1977. Mardones, Figueroa, Zuleta, Drouillas, and
De la Fuente were freed in June of 1977. Jorge Troncoso became a disappeared person.
47
See Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” 53–54.
48
Cadava and Cortés Rocca, “Notes on Love and Photography,” 8. Cadava and Cortés-Rocca offer here an
evocative reading of Barthes’s essay. Jacques Rancière offers a somewhat different reading of Barthes’s essay in
The Emancipated Spectator. He proposes that we concentrate on the different indeterminations present in the image.
These indeterminations—the interplay of given visual elements and selected temporal issues, attitudes, different
positions of the subject in the frame, etc.—constitute the pensiveness of the image. The philosopher defines this
notion as “an effect of circulation, between the subject, the photographer and us, of the intentional and the
unintentional, the known and the unknown, the expressed and the unexpressed, the present and the past” (114–115).
49
The concept of habeas corpus is a legal recourse, defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a “a writ for
inquiring into the lawfulness of the restraint of a person who is imprisoned or detained in another’s custody” and as
“the right of a citizen to obtain a writ of habeas corpus as a protection against illegal imprisonment.”
50
Navarro, interview, 10-VII-16.
51
Precht, ¿Dónde están? Vol. I, 10. Emphasis added.
52
My formulation of the photo-copy is inspired by ideas put forward by Jacques Derrida in Paper-Machine: “So
there’s what we normally use, following the ‘usual’ name, papier-machine, to the letter, in the strict or the literal
sense: the form of a matter, the sheet designed as the backing or medium for a typewriter’s writing, and also now for
the printing, reproduction, and archiving of the products of so many word-processing machines, and the like. This
then is what becomes a figure here, what a rhetorician would also call a ‘locus’” (1).
53
Derrida, Archive Fever, 17.
54
Stoler, “On Archiving as Dissensus,” 47.
55
Precht, ¿Dónde están? Vol. I, 10–12.
56
Ibid.
57
Ferraris, ¿Dónde están? Vol. 5, 6.
58
Azoulay, “Archive,” n.p.
59
See Introduction.
60
Camilo D. Trumper explores some of these ephemeral practices of protests in his book Ephemeral Histories.
Public Art, Politics, and the Struggle for the Streets in Chile.
61
Varas, Luz Donoso, 196.
62
Ibid.
63
Donoso Et al., “Acciones de Apoyo,” 4.
64
Donoso had used the portrait of Valdenegro previously. These actions were also made in collaboration with
Parada. For “Delito persistente” (Persistent Crime), the artists produced a big banner with Valdenegro’s portrait and
the legal definition of “delito persistente,” which they had cropped from a newspaper. They used the banner in
several demonstrations organized by the Agrupación in 1979. See Varas, Luz Donoso, 172–77.
65
Nelly Richard points out this dialectic between visibility and invisibility in her reading of the action. See Richard,
“Imagen, recuerdo y borraduras,” 68–69. For more on this action, see also Varas, Luz Donoso, 183.
66
Quoted in Varas, Luz Donoso, 183.
67
Cadava and Cortés-Rocca, “Notes on Love and Photography,” 7.
68
See Varas, Luz Donoso, 185.
69
Quoted in Varas, Luz Donoso, 126. About the different stages of “Obrabierta A,” see Varas, Luz Donoso, 124–37.
70
Hernán Parada, e-mail message to author, 11-XII-18. Located in Santiago’s General Cemetery in Chile, Patio 29
is the largest mass grave used by the military during the dictatorship. There, the military secretly buried hundreds of
political prisoners anonymously.
71
Taylor refers to this phenomenon as “percepticide”: “The triumph of the atrocity was that it forced people to look
away […] spectacles of violence rendered the population silent, deaf, and blind.” Disappearing Acts, 122–123.
72
We know of the content of this performance thanks to the audio recording made by Luz Donoso.
73
See Peggy Phelan, “Haunted Stages: Performance and the Photographic Effect.”
74
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12.
75
Cadava, Words of Light, 113.
76
Thayer, “El xenotafio de luz,” 173.
77
Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 120.
78
Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 115.
79
Hernán Parada, e-mail message to author, 19-V-15.
80
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 178. Taylor’s claim that the photos of the detainees were purged
from official archives should be reconsidered. Víctor Basterra’s Testimonio sobre el Centro Clandestino de
Detención de la ESMA (Testimony about ESMA’s Clandestine Detention Center), published in 1984, proves the
widespread use of photographic archives inside clandestine detention centers. For more on Basterra’s testimony and
ESMA’s photographic archive, see Luis Ignacio García and Ana Longoni, “Imágenes invisibles. Acerca de las fotos
de desaparecidos;” see also Claudia Feld, “La imagen que muestra el secreto. Alice Domon y Léonie Duquet
fotografiadas en la ESMA.”
81
Noble, “Travelling Theories of Family Photography and the Material Culture of Human Rights in Latin America,”
46.

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Ángeles Donoso Macaya 1

The Insubordination of Photography. Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship

Persistence of the Portrait

It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography.

Not having a family photograph is tantamount to not being a part of humankind.

arena-turned-imprisonment, torture, and execution camp.2 Outside of the National Stadium,

you seen this person inside?”3

composition and dissemination of the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared. My

Desaparecidos (AFDD) (Association of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared) gave the

disappeared even further.

photographic portraits endured—displacements and transformations that were necessary to

of the composition of the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared was concomitant to

its objects—copies of ID photos, re-photographed photos, contact-sheets, photocopies, etc.—

public display of photographic portraits was critical in putting a face—that is a visual

representation—to the crime of forced disappearances.

disappeared persons. The re-photographed and photocopied portraits I study performed as

defy the common view of the photograph as mainly an index or a trace.

consolidated in these publications.

contact-sheet at the Vicaría’s photographic archive. I am getting ahead of myself…because

the question about the portraits’ emergence—which flourished collectively: it began as a

<a> (De)Constructing the Photographic Portrait

Which representational mechanisms and instances of identification, commemoration,

composition of the portraits, it is worthwhile to begin evoking an idea formulated by Walter

looking at photographs, is core in the notion of the Benjaminian aura.13

photographer was confronted, in the person of every client, with a member of a

exactly congruent as they become incongruent in the period of decline that

Benjamin establishes thus a significant affinity between industrialization processes, the

commercialization of photography—specifically of the studio portrait—and the contrived quality

of the photographic portrait.

prevent ambiguity in the photographs, Bertillon insisted on the importance of a standardized

so Bertillon created a file in which he included, besides the photographic portrait, an

anthropometric description and a series of abbreviated and standardized notes.

We typically think of the ID photo as an almost exclusively denotative object, a sign of

reproduction of its referent—criminal record photography depended on a whole system of

cartes de visite that joined—and indeed anticipated—criminal photography in delimiting what

representations that continue being displayed to this day.

deserves the question, ‘Who are they? What does it mean?’”21

several processes of manipulation and reproduction (cropping, enhancement, etc.).

regarding their textual and visual representations—including, of course, the photographic

of representation. The flesh-and-blood victims, forcefully absented from the

victim reemerged as icons, either as “subversives” (for the military government)

photographic portraits displayed by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, she reasons:

“alive.” They tempt us to see them as “natural” and transparent manifestations of

uncritical acceptance of the object as the thing itself.24

photograph: minimum proof of existence against an uncertainty that increases.”26 According to

more generally, the traces of an impression.”27

Roland Barthes’s formulation of the photograph as a physical “emanation of the referent”

over-dramatized in the case of the photographic portraits of disappeared people.

victims to remember and make us remember the past.30

iconic representation of an individual (just like a painted portrait can be an iconic

envisage love and the work of memory, etc.

whether “alternative or supplementary depictions of disappearance” can emerge.32 The problem

overwhelming iconicity that their evocative force resides.

development and dissemination of documentary photography.

organized method designed to exterminate opponents considered dangerous and to avoid

moment, the concept of detained-disappeared did not exist as such.

Vicaría staff devised a very efficient data-keeping-and-analyzing system that listed

biometrical and biographical personal information, including political affiliation, union

regards to the detained-disappeared.

contemporaneous to the repressive regime it resisted—the civic-military dictatorship—but also it

of publications—bulletins and internal reports prepared by the Church—and record-keeping

systems—including the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared.

key role in the composition of the visual representation of the detained-disappeared.